From 1918 to the late 1940s, a host of influential scientists and intellectuals in Europe and North America were engaged in a number of far-reaching unity of science projects. In this period of deep social and political divisions, scientists collaborated to unify sciences across disciplinary boundaries and to set up the international scientific community as a model for global political co-operation. They strove to align scientific and social objectives through rational planning and to promote unified science as the driving force (...) of human civilization and progress. This volume explores the unity of science movement, providing a synthetic view of its pursuits and placing it in its historical context as a scientific and political force. Through a coherent set of original case studies looking at the significance of various projects and strategies of unification, the book highlights the great variety of manifestations of this endeavour. These range from unifying nuclear physics to the evolutionary synthesis, and from the democratization of scientific planning to the utopianism of H.G. Wells's world state. At the same time, the collection brings out the substantive links between these different pursuits, especially in the form of interconnected networks of unification and the alignment of objectives among them. Notably, it shows that opposition to fascism, using the instrument of unified science, became the most urgent common goal in the 1930s and 1940s. In addressing these issues, the book makes visible important historical developments, showing how scientists participated in, and actively helped to create, an interwar ideology of unification, and bringing to light the cultural and political significance of this enterprise. (shrink)

One of the points of principle made by Cartwright is that the fundamental laws do not describe reality because they are always employed together with ceteris paribus clauses, the implication being that ceteris paribus assumptions always have dire consequences. We here wish to offer a dynamical interpretation of ceteris paribus laws in terms of their stability or fragility. On this interpretation, the consequences of ceteris paribus assumptions become concretely dependent on the nature of the laws under consideration and cannot be (...) decided in a blanket fashion a priori. Using insights from nonlinear dynamical systems theory, we shall put forward the idea that any assumption of the general validity or invalidity of ceteris paribus laws amounts to a stability or fragility assumption, respectively. We shall then argue that it is in certain cases possible to relativise the consequences of ceteris paribus assumptions in a concrete way. We shall also indicate briefly how the same principle applies to Cartwright's arguments concerning composition of causes and approximations. Overall, our intention is to suggest a framework within which Cartwright's intuitions about the fundamental laws of physics could be grounded. (shrink)

This volume is presented in honour of Heinz Post, who founded a distinc tive and distinguished school of philosophy of science at Chelsea College, University of London. The 'Chelsea tradition' in philosophy of science takes the content of science seriously, as exemplified by the papers presented here. The unifying theme of this work is that of 'Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics', after the title of a classic and seminal paper by Heinz Post, published in 1971, which is reproduced in this volume (...) with the kind permission of the editors and publishers of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Described by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method as "brilliant" and " . . . a partial antidote against the view which I try to defend" (1975, p. 61, fn. 17), this paper, peppered with illustrative examples from the history of science, brings to the fore some of Heinz Post's central concerns: the heuristic criteria used by scientists in constructing their theories, the intertheoretic relationships which these criteria reflect and, in particular, the nature of the correspondence that holds between a theory and its predecessors (and its suc cessors). The appearance of this volume more than twenty years later is an indica tion of the fruitfulness of Post's contribution: philosophers of science continue to explore the issues raised in his 1971 paper. (shrink)

Fifteen essays are contained in this collection, all relating to Heinz Post ’ s article ‘ Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics ’, also reprinted. In this article, written in the heyday of the post - positivist movement, Post aims to convince his fellowphilosophers of science to bring the issue of heuristics back to the philosophical stage. Examining a wealth of theories and models from the physics and chemistry of the last 300 years, Post extracts several strategies of theory construction of which (...) he considers the General Correspondence Principle to be the most important. According to this principle, any acceptable newtheory should explain the well - confirmed part of its predecessor. Later Post states the General Correspondence Principle more precisely and uses it with what he considers its de facto validity to argue against incommensurability, Kuhn - losses, 1 and relativism. Post himself seems to support a kind of convergent realism which is most notably expressed in his credo that science progresses linearly. (shrink)

This article revisits theologian Ulrich Duchrow’s three-decade-old use of the Protestant notion of status confessionis to denounce the capitalist global economy. Scholars quickly dismissed Duchrow’s argument; however, philosopher Thomas Pogge has developed a remarkable “negative duty”—based critique of the current global economic order that might help revitalize Duchrow’s position. The article argues that sound reasons exist for the churches to declare the contemporary world economy a—provisionally termed—status confessionis minor. After explaining the inadequacy of Duchrow’s original position and summarizing Pogge’s account, (...) the article develops a twofold argument. First, Pogge’s in-depth inquiry into the world economy gives Duchrow’s call for a status confessionis a strong yet narrowing economic foundation. Second, to declare the world economy a status confessionis minor is theological-ethically justifiable if the limited though indispensable “prophetic” significance of doing so is acknowledged. Thus, Duchrow’s approach is justified, but only partially. (shrink)

The late influential American intellectual Michael Novak was a self-declared devotee of Reinhold Niebuhr, arguably the foremost twentieth-century American theologian. Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) was an attempt to fill the political-economic lacuna in Niebuhr’s thought. The present article offers a Niebuhrian irony–focused response to Novak’s democratic capitalism in view of climate change as probably the greatest threat facing humanity. Novak quite successfully extended Niebuhrian ideas into a theology-based vision of democratic capitalism as the only political-economic system effective (...) in widely lifting people out of poverty. Yet he failed to acknowledge human-induced climate change as beyond reasonable doubt and rooted in the predominantly American invention of a fossil energy–based capitalist political economy. This article’s thesis is that Novak’s democratic capitalism entails Niebuhrian irony: the virtue it displays about resources becomes a vice due to Novak’s irresponsible post–Spirit of Democratic Capitalism attempt to represent democratic capitalism as innocent of any dangerous climate-change implications. (shrink)

This paper is an essay review of Steven French and Harmke Kamminga (eds.), Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics. Essays in Honour of Heinz Post (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993). I distinguish a varity of correspondence relations between scientific theories (exemplified by cases from the book under review) and examine how one can make sense of the the prevailing continuity in scientific theorizing.